Supporting FreeBSD

As a FreeBSD user and developer, I obviously care about the success of
FreeBSD. I make a small contribution towards this success via my role
as Security Officer; but the time I spend working on my
Tarsnap online backup service
prevents me from making as much of a direct contribution as I would
like. Fortunately the
FreeBSD Foundation
does an excellent job of supporting FreeBSD development; but like most
such organizations, they are funded entirely by donations and are always
in need of more. In light of this, I am pleased to announce that I
will be donating all of the profits made by
Tarsnap for the month of December
to the FreeBSD Foundation.

Much of the work done by the FreeBSD Foundation is done behind the
scenes, but the importance of the work they do is undeniable. They
sponsor a range of important FreeBSD development which would likely
not get done otherwise; in the past year this has included

Improvements to the TCP stack,

Addition of IEEE 802.11s mesh networking,

A new console driver,

Support for removal of active disk devices (i.e., to be able to yank
out a USB disk without causing a FreeBSD kernel panic),

Flattened Device Tree support,

AVR32 platform support, and

A new highly-available (clustered) storage layer.

In addition to directly sponsoring FreeBSD development, the FreeBSD
Foundation plays an important role in indirectly supporting development
work by bringing developers together: They sponsor BSD conferences such as
BSDCan,
EuroBSDCon, and
AsiaBSDCon, and provide
funding to allow FreeBSD developers to attend (they paid for my travel
to and from BSDCan'06, for instance). Further, although the FreeBSD
Project runs mostly on donated computer hardware, there are instances
where it is necessary to purchase equipment for development purposes,
and here too the Foundation plays a critical role.

Finally, the FreeBSD Foundation plays a vital role in taking care of
legal matters, whether it be handling the FreeBSD trademarks, making
recommendations on how FreeBSD should handle new licenses (e.g., GPLv3),
or representing FreeBSD in dealings with organizations which will only
deal with official legally-constituted entities. Much of this work
falls into areas where every FreeBSD developer has an opinion yet
none of us are qualified to have an opinion; having the Foundation
get actual legal advice from one or more actual lawyers not only
increases the chance of getting things right, but also cuts out the
large amount of developer time which would otherwise be wasted by having
everybody express their opinions... and their opinions of everybody
else's opinions.